Barack Odama is probably one of those albums best described as ‘open to interpretation’. The Rick Ross behind Odama isn’t a high-rolling Florida rapper but is in fact the alias of Glasgow producer Kyle Logan, who created the album at Shady Lane Studio in Erskine. Trust me when I say this isn’t rap music.
In a sense, it’s difficult to ratify what makes this album enjoyable – yet on another level it’s extremely easy. Barack Odama is a 20-song collection of experimental lo-fi hip-hop which blends white noise, sporadically glitchy breakbeats and broken, wretched acoustic samples. The mixture which comes out of Rick Ross’ process is a precise piece of decomposition – an ethereal, abstract work of malfunctioning clockwork ticks and crackles.
Despite the zen-like airiness of the record, each track has its own distinguishing cues to separate one from another . Think snowflakes, but as sound. The opening combination of DIY Tar and New Decision Unit is a fantastic example of the album’s apparent multi-layered structure; the two collaborate across looping, broken crashes and rusty breakbeats. The entire three minute sequence appears to break down completely, rebooting in a blast of ticks and whirrs: a bunch of cogs hard-wired to a chirping cricket.
That’s just my interpretation, and therein lies Barack Odama‘s appeal. It’s a musical collage of sorts, made up of bizarrely named tracks with motifs which, while abstract, are very much there. Finding A Skull In The Garden finds semblance within repetition, pops and crackles dripping over shimmery, lonely synth pads. The sharp cut to Bill Murray Melting Upon Exposure To Moonlight and its melding of plundered garbled speech and videogame-inspired bleeps sends an ironically clear message: it’s up to you to work out what’s going on here.
The variety on offer here is undeniable. Now There Is Summer rides on the vocal repetition of the title, its relatively grounded guitar and standard rock beat; January 55th‘s acoustic guitars and wintry chimes skip over one another, as if being edited and shifted in real time by somebody not quite happy with the mix. Love Me‘s hollow bell chimes strike an uncomfortably lonely chord, out of character when compared to the more chilled zen garden pieces such as the closing Neither Of These Alone Is Enough.
The sketchiness of the white noise that crackles and creaks across the album speaks of its DIY, haberdashery approach. That the album is so abstract in what it does is where its power lies – and for some it may be the notion that puts them off. Barack Odama will not be for everybody – it’s called ‘experimental’ music for a reason – but that it is so gloriously open to interpretation means that it is at least one of this year’s more interesting listens. That’s just the way I see it, anyway.
Barack Odama is available now on the Rick Ross Bandcamp for a price of your choosing.
Disclosure: Kyle Logan and I follow one another on Twitter.
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